The Hunger Angel

by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (Metropolitan)

Written in terse, hypnotic prose, this moving novel by a recent Noble laureate is set in a Russian Gulag at the end of the Second World War. The narrator, Leo Auberg, a member of Romania’s German-speaking minority, arrives at the age of seventeen and remains for five years. Surviving on bread and cabbage soup, the internees are maddened by starvation; in Leo’s mind, they are controlled by a “hunger angel,” who drives them to steal food from one another and clothes from still warm corpses. Leo, who is further alienated by his nascent homosexuality, takes comfort in the objects and materials that surround him—the shape of his shovel, the texture of wet cement—and his lengthy depictions, as exquisite as they are bleak, make up much of the novel. “I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren’t alive but aren’t dead either,” he says. ♦